Managing software updates for large-scale infrastructures presents challenges for IT administrators. In order to keep track of the latest updates to various machines on a network, a large amount of device and version information must be maintained and updated periodically to reflect any changes which occur.
Conventional methods for software updates may be based on specific companies and their preferred approaches to distributing the updates. For example, distribution models which are known include “water fall”, “spiral”, “agile”, etc. Automated patch updates may assist with the burden of wide-scale updating, however, the automation is not enough to ensure security as hackers and unauthorized parties could simulate the approach taken by the organization and distribute harmful software to many different devices on the network.